Abstract

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which began construction in 2007, will demonstrate the physical and technological feasibility of fusion for power production [1]. It will employ tungsten at areas with high particle and power load (divertor entrance and baffles) owing to its high-energy threshold for sputtering and its low sputtering yield compared to the low-Z materials such as C and Be, which will be used in parallel. Although the requirements for the plasma-facing components (PFCs) in ITER will already be higher than in the present-day devices, the step to a quasisteady-state DEMO reactor will still considerably increase the particle fluencies to the PFCs. Therefore, it is foreseen that tungsten will be used as an armor material for all PFCs [2] in future fusion reactors.